Back in 2006 I decided to cook all 1293 recipes in "The Gourmet Cookbook." It took a few years, but I made them all! Now I have moved on to the over 1100 recipes in "Gourmet Today." I anticipate several more years of kitchen fun!

I picked this spread to make for a party I was hosting on Friday because it was the first recipe in The Book that I hadn't made yet (now I have made the first 19 consecutive recipes). I neither have anything terribly positive nor terribly negative to say about this eggplant "caviar." I will comment that it bore no resemblance to caviar. Was it meant to look like caviar, or taste like caviar? It achieved neither, so let's just drop the "caviar" from the name and refer to this here on out as eggplant spread. This eggplant spread was fine. It had a lot of flavor to it and was reasonably well-balanced. I didn't love the texture -- it didn't have any smoothness or creaminess to it. There was very little fat emulsified into this spread, and that was obvious from the texture. It had a rather watery quality to it. I wasn't at all enthusiastic about this dip, but I also wasn't ashamed to serve it (which can't be said for some of the other dishes that night...). There are better eggplant spreads out there.

This recipe isn't online.

Wow, am I ever tired! This past weekend there was a meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in Bloomington. These meeting are huge and divided into special sessions on various topics. There was a special session on Applications of Ring Spectra that I participated in. It made for a very hectic weekend! On Saturday I was giving a talk in the special session, which was nerve-wracking, as most of the speakers were very well-established famous people in my field. No pressure. On Friday night I hosted a dinner for the participants of our special session, which meant that those same famous people came to my apartment to eat my food. Again, no pressure! Add to that attending talks all day Saturday and Sunday, and basically the weekend was exhausting! It was fun though -- I got to see various math friends that I hadn't seen in a while, and Vigleik and Jenny stayed with me, so I got a chance to hang out with them even more. And my talk went totally fine, which was a big relief (dinner also went fine, but I was significantly less concerned about that). Overall it was a really good meeting. People gave excellent talks, and I think everyone had fun. It was also nice not having to travel anywhere to attend!